Python does this to me as well. Also csharp has had a habit of DLL upgrades running amok (and proprietary frameworks are ALWAYS happy to break your old app ). I think the language that gives me the least trouble long-term is go… but then that’s because I spend a whole day just getting...

Avdi, how do you feel about auto-formatting? I feel like the Go community has succeeded with its experiment of mandating use of gofmt. I’ve been programming for enough decades now, in dozens of languages and with different coding styles, that I don’t care about my arbitrary, petty per...

Personally, I think there are several things to blame for this problem. The first are the developers creating these large projects. I have worked on two rather large projects, my current one, including tests, is 300+ KLOC (140+KLOC without). For the current one, culprit is that it was...

32 patterns for writing confident code. How to avoid the “MacGyver method”–a step-by-step guide to thinking about methods in terms of the story they tell rather than the building blocks that happen to be lying around. The most comprehensive coverage anywhere of Ruby’s conversion metho...